What is ultrasonic cleaning?
Sep 3rd, 2008 by Dr. Kourosh Maddahi DDS
Dental cleaning can be done with hand instruments called scalers or it can be cleaned with a machine called an ultrasonic cleaner. If there is a lot of tartar buildup, I always recommend the ultrasonic cleaner first to get major parts of the tartar out. After the ultrasonic cleaning, some fine scaling tools are used to remove the rest of the tartar.
The good thing about ultrasonic cleaners is that there is less damage because there is no scraping affecting the teeth, but this method does not 100% take the place of the hand scalers. There are some areas that should be hand scaled.